Robert Macfarlane

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2019 WINNER OF THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020 'You'd be crazy not to read this book' The Sunday Times A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century From the internationally bestselling, prize-winning author of Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Old Ways In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane's long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart. SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2020 'Macfarlane has invented a new kind of book, really a new genre entirely' The Irish Times 'He is the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation' Wall Street Journal 'Macfarlane has shown how utterly beautiful a brilliantly written travel book can still be' Observer on The Old Ways 'Irradiated by a profound sense of wonder... Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly' Independent on Landmarks 'It sets the imagination tingling...like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems' The Sunday Times on The Old Ways

A Deep Time Journey

Underland

Bastien Vaucher

'Does it change the way the world feels?' I ask him. 'Knowing that too trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter - about what matters? Are you surprised we don't fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?'

'At the weekends,' Christopher says, 'when I'm out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we're walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.’

He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe.

'But mostly, and in several ways, I'm amazed I'm able to hold the hand of the person I love.’

Where the pollards spread out to form the canopies, I realize I can trace patterns of space running along the edges of each tree's canopy: the beautiful phenomenon known as 'crown shyness’, whereby individual forest trees respect each other's space, leaving slender running gaps between the end of one tree's outermost leaves and the start of another's.

Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant via the network that i should up-regulate its defensive response before the aphids reach it.

It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of diffusible hormones. But such airborne warnings are imprecise in their destinations. When the compounds travel by fungal networks, both the source and recipient can be specified. Our growing comprehension of the forest network asks profound questions: about where species begin and end, about whether a forest might best be imagined as a super-organism, and about what 'trading', 'sharing' or even 'friendship' might mean between plants and, indeed, between humans.

The residue of over 600 years of quarrying is that beneath the south of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than 200 miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, organized into three main regions that together spread beneath nine arrondissements. This network is the vides de carrières - the 'quarry voids', the catacombs.

The weight on 2,000-year-old ice can reach half-a-ton per square linch. The air in this ice has been so compressed that cores brought up by deep drilling will fracture and snap as the air expands. This is why glaciers sound like shooting ranges. This is why if you were to drop a piece of very old blue ice in a glass of water or whisky, it might shatter the glass.

Underland quotes

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